Jon Bishop

@shiraeis @gracieabrams Great voice! Any beginner guides you'd recommend?

I told you things by @gracieabrams 🤍 the acoustics in my new sf apartment hit

@therealishmatt Amazing! What tools are you using for the launch/marketing that follows?

The system is running on overdrive. It’s found ~1500 ideas, approved 100, and currently building 15 in parallel.

I wonder if any of the resistance would disappear if the product is marketed as a personal productivity product (their choice) vs. something their employer runs with access to the data. I use an app to track app usage across my computer, which has helped me in several ways, but my attitude would change a lot if it was something I had to use with an employer. I'm building a repo growth analytics product and have come across several tools like githubtracker.com, though, so I wonder if it's more an issue with anything installed locally.

developers are rare in that they have a job where they get to say "don't measure me" and somehow everyone just accepts it sales people get dashboards tracking every call, every email, every deal marketers get attribution on everything but suggest looking at how devs actually use their tools, and suddenly you're the villain we have access to more behavioral data than ever before... and we're too scared to use it :)

@vig_xyz Great post!

a lot of people are suddenly asking me how to get into independent consulting. it’s kinda a complicated answer so i’ll write up thoughts here vs repeating many times the problem is independent consulting seen is a lifestyle business. but it’s not really, because you constantly need to manage the business itself. 0 safety net, and the market is always shifting. it can be quite stressful in some ways, especially if you’re truly doing it alone you first need to understand the hierarchy of how to make money within consulting, based on scale: - hourly rates. does not scale at all, you will eventually just be working full-time except with no benefits and no equity. you’ll also notice that there’s a cap on what you can really charge hourly, as you’ll be compared to in-house - monthly retainers. same as above but now you have some guarantee of how much money you’ll make monthly - project-based. people often start by doing this based on labor still. figure out how many hours you think it’ll take, multiply by a rate, then offer and try to beat it. ok but still not great - value-based project. charge based on what solving a problem is actually worth. if they’re losing 100k a month on something that you solve, why would you want to get paid for 100 hours of work? this is when it starts making sense. read @patio11 ‘s post on consulting pricing to understand more - advisory. this is tricky, because you can offer this as a monthly charge for just advice. it’s harder to show that you specifically had an outcome though, but it scales a bit better if you have great deal flow - courses. this does scale really well. because if you have the right market you can sell to lots of individuals and companies at once, and create a flywheel. but you need to be sure you wanna spend the effort on it, bc it’s a lot of work to run a course well. i did one with @jxnlco and learned a lot now, you need to understand why someone would hire you. why should they not try to have someone internally solve it, or try to hire someone full time? the only good answer is that it’d be impossible for them to and it’s actually a problem worth solving. all other answers don’t close deals. let’s talk about the money a bit. you lose out on equity, which often times is how you make it big in startups and tech. if you’re good, this is a downside, as you can probably find startups where the equity is worth it. you also need to pay more for taxes, accountants, lawyers, personal assistants. travel, etc. you make some of it back with tax deductions, but i wouldn’t get into this world for that reason alone overall… you can see how this is maybe more complicated than it seems. so who is it still with it for? i think if you offer something very unique in the market and know how to consistently sell it well, that’s a necessary piece. then you need to value independence above all else, which most people actually don’t even if they think they do. and you need to be willing to re-invent yourself a lot more. there’s no career path exactly in this world. what people want will always be changing. it’s been worth it for me!

@rywalker @AlexReibman @moltbook Yeah, it's a marketing campaign

@AlexReibman i’m 99.9% sure those posts were directed by a human for their agent to post, to get attention - by default clawdbot/openclaw bots are not taking any action on @moltbook without a human telling them what to say and when

Anthropic HQ must be in full freak out mode right now

@mickeyxfriedman Very eloquent, maybe a second career as a dating coach?

respectfully, this wouldn't work avoidants are kind of like flat worms. flatworms penis-fight when they mate and the weaker one becomes female and carries the eggs likewise, when two avoidants date, the weaker one will become anxiously attached back to square one

Marketing a dev tool product? It’s 2026 and Product-Led Growth is more important than ever for dev tools. AI and other trends are leading to big changes, which is why I just published this great guest post from @draftdev on how PLG is evolving: saasgrowthpros.com/product-led-gr…

Is impressions the overall goal? Someone asked about how I was building a different account and these are some of my learnings in case they're helpful: - Post in communities because they give you a built-in audience. I’ve been making a couple of posts here and there to post communities and I'm going to ramp it up. - Reply guy is one of the most tried and true early methods and it can be easy (though mind-numbing) - Pay attention to your ratios (posts/replies to profile visit to new follower or website visit) and plan the input accordingly. - I’m trying to put in 50-100 tweets a day and I pretty quickly hit a bottle neck with finding good tweets to reply to, so you’ll want to build lists of people (and keep building them as you go along) to make it easy and to make sure you’re building a quality audience. - Get use to tweeting a lot, tweeting as soon as you have an idea (though scheduling is fine), and just getting pretty much any kind of thought out there (if it’s a personal account). It takes a lot of work at first to understand what works. - Setting aside an hour or two and batching the tweets is really helpful, especially because it can take me 10-15 mins to hit rapid reply mode. - Next I plan to post a lot more to communities, work in more complex posts, incorporate image memes, and build out my lists of people to reply to.

1 week into posting every day Measuring based on impressions: 1) 1.6k 2) 31k 3) .5k 4) 11k 5) 13.5k 6) 2.2k 7) 1.2k Here is what i am learning

@colecallinan @Pavel_Asparagus @mprkhrst 😂 amazing work

When you watch Soham on TBPN today just know that @Pavel_Asparagus and I made it happen and it had nothing to do with @mprkhrst

@MicRum Oh yeah, I was just thinking of what's behind closed doors if this drone is being revealed so publicly

@jonbishop not autonomous, but that's a good start!

If a mosquito can fly, see, and sense CO2, what's stopping us from building autonomous drones that small?

@justinstorre Congrats! I'm excited to try it (and the rest of your features) out soon

🫡 insta hit

@patrickachase Congrats!

I joined Redpoint as an intern - a software engineer with a passion for technology and an eagerness to learn. Today, I’m honored to continue this journey as a Managing Director. To the incredible founders who’ve trusted me to be a small part of their story, thank you. It’s been such a privilege. And to Alex, Satish, Erica, Annie and the whole Redpoint crew thank you for taking a chance on me and showing me what great investing looks like. Can’t express how grateful I am and excited for this next chapter!

@PratapRanade @ycombinator @sama @ryanrrowe I was a big fan of Kimono!

In honor of @ycombinator's 20th anniversary, here are my 6 favorite lessons: 1. The 7 minute espresso rule: Our first meeting with @sama lasted just seven minutes. The batch hadn’t even officially started yet and my cofounder @ryanrrowe and I drove down from Mountain View to the tiny SF YC outpost to meet him. Sam was making an espresso when we walked in. He opened with – “have you launched”? We said no, too many bugs. Our product, kimono, made it easy to just point and click to build a web scraper. Our promise was to get you an API in 60 seconds, without writing a single line of code. But, the web is vast, and websites are very different. We needed it to work on a large enough spectrum of sites so that our first users would have a good experience. It worked on just a handful of sites at the time. Sam pushed us to make sure we were launched in less than 2 weeks. We debated, highlighting the complexity of the bugs and the limits of underlying headless browsing technology. The espresso finished brewing, he picked it up, looked at us and said, “well, you better get going then and fix those bugs”. We left, launched within those next two weeks and learned one of the most important lessons that day - speed matters. Ship something you’re embarrassed by. 2. There are no experts. Ryan and I were not prepared for the rapid influx of user on launch day. We did 88 user interviews to validate our product idea, and everyone basically said they wouldn’t use it. We thought they were wrong and built it anyway. It got tons of traffic on day 1. We didn’t sleep in the 48 hours following because our servers and database kept crashing. We hadn’t indexed it properly. We realized we weren’t the experts and needed to hire one. We went over to @mwseibel's apartment for advice. Michael smiled and told us about the early days at SocialCam, that eventually became Twitch – experts thought the streaming video problem was too hard to be possible. The answer wasn’t hiring an expert, but hiring someone young, capable and naïve enough to give it an earnest try. So we opted to just figure it out ourselves. 3. Messages in Pizza Boxes. Startups win through incredible customer service, then through product, not the other way around. @mwseibel told us how SocialCam’s streaming infrastructure went down while a key teammate was unreachable off-grid in a Tahoe cabin for the weekend. Normal people would have waited until Monday. Not Michael. He called a local pizza delivery place and asked the delivery person to send a large pizza with an urgent message in the box to the cabin. Their infrastructure was back up in hours. 4. The Twinkle can matter more than the TAM. Ambition matters just as much as practicality. Before demo day, we were struggling with the end note of our pitch. We knew the value of our product, and had a fanatical and fast-growing user base, but the market size we calculated either seemed so ridiculously big that it was not plausible, or so narrow that it was equally silly. @paulg and @gralston sat with us and showed us that if we can really pull it off at scale, it would be bigger than Google. So, we could skip the market size, if we really believed it. PG suggested not talking about market size, but just making sure people could see the twinkle in our eyes when we talked about what you might be able to do with a structured copy of the internet that’s larger than Google’s. 5. You’re always at the Origin. Our demo day was successful beyond our wildest beliefs. Afterwards, Geoff Ralston drew a chart for us on a whiteboard. It was a hockey stick. He asked us where we thought we were. It was a rhetorical question. He said we were at the origin, and that the most important thing is to remember that. Sam Altman doubled down. When he invested in Kimono, he gave us a Zimbabwean Trillion dollar note (the result of extreme hyperinflation in Zimbabwe), as a cautionary reminder that the fundraising and valuation mean nothing. We have channeled this into our culture at @TheArenaAI with our ritual around neon shoelaces and a pair of neon track spikes hanging on the wall to remind us that we’re at the Olympic starting line, but we don’t have any medals yet. 6. High bandwidth discussions with users don’t happen over email. The Collison brothers, who founded Stripe, took user engagement to the next level – so much so that “Collison installation” is part of YC lore. @collision told us that talking to users was essential because email and chat conversations were not “high bandwidth” enough. He emphasized the importance of what you can learn being with users in person or talking to them over Skype (remember, this was early 2014!). We took this to heart, and spoke to hundreds of users at Kimono regularly over Skype. One power user @alexanderchung, who I met this way, has become a close friend and even attended my wedding in India. At Arena, we now go a step further and regularly fly to our users. We over-invest to a degree that is almost crazy in order to be more than a supplier — a true partner to our early customers. YC taught us it’s the only way to understand their problems on the ground and really make sure our products work for them. YC taught us to outsource very little. Own the problem. Own the outcome. And if you do, you get to be stupidly ambitious. If you’re curious about @kimonolabs (which we later sold to @PalantirTech ), here was our launch demo. No-code web scraping before “no code” was even a term: Here's our demo day pitch, from 2014. Forever grateful to those above + @garrytan @jesslivingston @tlbtlbtlb

@DylanLaCom It’s been rough to watch!

Absolutely heartbreaking and surreal day in Los Angeles. So many places I grew up with and loved, icons of the city, are gone. I feel for everyone directly impacted by these fires. And to the literal 1000’s of firefighters and emergency responders working tirelessly to protect this city, thank you!

@toddham Amazing 😂😂! It's a good look for you

Can't wait to share this next AIProxy sample project. My finest work so far lol!

@davj @fondocom That's huge, congrats!

Today, I’m thrilled to share that @fondocom has raised a $7M seed round to accelerate our mission of putting accounting on autopilot for startups. With Fondo, startups don’t need to worry about tax penalties, financial statement errors, or missing out on up to $500k in tax credits. Onboard in minutes then set & forget — taxes are filed on time, timely and accurate financial reporting is delivered, and cash back tax credits from the IRS (up to $500k per year) are claimed and received. Over 1,000 startups trust us to put their bookkeeping, taxes, and tax credits on autopilot and starting today any startup can try Fondo for $1: fondo.info/494Le3l We are very grateful for our supporters in this round. The round is led by @moneyforward (@rakeemrakeem, @Yosuke0630) with participation from @ycombinator (@gustaf, @mwseibel, @daltonc, @arnavsahu341), @foolventures (Maggie Dorn, @TMFWillSommers, Abigail Malin), @nextcoastVP (@mikesmerklo, Michael Maloney, @KaitDeBernardo), @twentytwovc (Katey Caldwell), @a16z scout fund (@theo, @wwshaef), @IndexVentures scout fund (@nitzanshapira), @costanoavc scout fund (@iamtoddjohnson), @1121vc (@itsmikerose), @rhobusiness (@everettcookny), @Capchase debt (@miguelflarrea) and angels including @CraigJamalLewis, @ChrisJBakke, @james406, @jshchnz, @gpcastle12, @LorenBrill, @Austen, @hpatel, @MattDoka, @jundoima, @iamjasonlevin, @daviddotwalker, @doubleshdw , @RTorenberg021, @danikalyon, @bisla, & others.

@agarwal @GrowSF amazing work!

In 2020 when we started @GrowSF, only 2 out of 11 Supervisors and 1 out of 7 School Board members were aligned with our commonsense priorities. Now we have 6 out of 11 Supervisors and 5 out of 7 School Board members, along with an aligned Mayor. 🚀 growsf.org/impact-report-…

@dvassallo @damengchen How does that make it better than subscriptions for you? I'd expect you could become "very confident" in the future of a subscription business far sooner.

@damengchen Pretty much the opposite in my opinion. After handling 60 consecutive months starting from zero, I feel very confident that whatever happens in the future I can fend for myself.

This is exactly the reason I don't like one-time payment products. It puts you on a non-stopping and can't-stop treadmill. No peace of mind.